Ophthalmology Business

OCT 2013

Ophthalmology Business is focused on business topics relevant to the entrepreneurial ophthalmologist. It offers editorial, opinion, and practical tips for physicians running an ophthalmic practice. It is a companion publication of EyeWorld.

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Page 11 of 27

Social, digital media
excellent platform for education
by Erin L. Boyle Senior Staff Writer
The website, Facebook page,
and blog cater to surgeons in a "for
surgeons, by surgeons" format. This
approach has worked effectively, Dr.
Oetting said, with Facebook allowing
for the most interactivity of the
three.
"What I have found, particularly
on the Facebook site that we have,
when we post a video [of a case] that
was tricky for us, an interesting or a
common problem that surgeons
encounter, we get all kinds of feedback, and it's productive feedback,"
he said.
Benefits, concerns
E
veryone these days,
it seems, has a
Facebook page, many
for staying in contact
with family and
friends. But the social media site, as
well as other social and digital media
websites, can be an effective way for
surgeons to connect and educate.
Through surgical video postings,
discussions online about difficult
cases, and pearls shared on blogs and
other forums, social media sites
including Facebook, YouTube, and
society pages can provide surgeons
multiple ways of connecting and
learning.
"I think [social media] is the best
way to [present] education material,
and for ophthalmologists whose primary job is not education, it's also a
great way to educate their patients.
I think for those reasons, it's powerful," said Thomas Oetting, MD,
University of Iowa Hospitals &
Clinics, Iowa City. "It's a way for us
to learn and grow as ophthalmologists. It's also a great way to learn
from each other."
Dr. Oetting helps run
EyeRounds.org, an educational
website from the University of Iowa
Department of Ophthalmology and
Visual Sciences, which is his longest
running project in the field, a
"Cataract Surgery" page on
Facebook, which has well over
14,000 likes, as well as a blog called
"Cataract Surgery for Green Horns,"
which has more than 180,000 page
views. He said the online concept
was started by then-resident at the
university, Andrew Doan, MD, who
Dr. Oetting called the "grandfather
of digital ophthalmology" because
he recognized the all-important
future for ophthalmology in social
and digital media.
Jorge Arroyo, MD, Beth Israel
Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC),
Harvard Medical School, Boston,
started a vitreoretinal web video
series called "The Endoscopic View"
to educate students and surgeons,
offered through the BIDMC website.
"The process of learning, at least
in medicine, not just in ophthalmology, and especially in surgery, is
essentially a communal process," he
said. "It's a process that involves
more than one person's experience,
more than one person's thoughts,
more than one person's education."
Dr. Arroyo said the morbidity
and mortality conference, or M&M,
is an important part of student education, facilitating discussion among
physicians about the various challenges, stakes, and issues in surgery.
He started the endoscopic video
series in January as an experiment,
to see if education similar to live
M&M conferences could be successfully achieved digitally.
continued on page 15
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Ophthalmology Business • October 2013